Neoliberal Homophobic Discourse: Heteronormative Human Capital and the Exclusion of Queer Citizens

Abstract

In this article, I examine the relationship between homophobic language use and its broader social context, focusing on how a U.S.-based, conservative Christian organization's institutionalized homophobic text-making practices seek to derive legitimacy from the broader political economic discourses associated with the neoliberal moment. Using the Family Research Council's statement on marriage and the family as the basis for analysis, I demonstrate how the organization seeks to represent lesbian and gay subjects and their kinship formations as a threat to human capital development because they are based on affectional relationships that neither reflect nor respond to the kinds of self-governance and marketization that neoliberalism requires of all citizen-subjects and their families. Linguistic strategies for creating such representations include lexical choices that avoid overtly identifying lesbian and gay subjects as the object of discussion, the creation of a taxonomy for what constitutes "proper" families-based on neoliberal principles--that implicitly excludes lesbian and gay kinship formations, and the use of neoliberal discourses of self-governance and marketization as the basis for that exclusion.

Making Sense of Neoliberal Subjectivity: A Discourse Analysis of Media Language on Self-development

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Resisting LGBT Rights Where “We Have Won”: Canada and Great Britain

“…There is a significant body of research on US-based conservative and/or religious organizations and the Christian Right examining their domestic agenda and their growing transnational spheres of influence through participation in United Nations activities and in the World Congress of Families (Buss and Herman, 2003;Burack and Josephson 2005;Crowley 2007;Peterson 2011;Todd and Ong 2012). Political science has examined LGBT legal and policy recognition using cross-national comparative analyses to explore factors such as the impact of multilevel state institutions, the organization, opportunities, and resources of LGBT movements and Christian right and conservative opponents, and the impact of political cultural factors on legal and policy change (Buss and Herman 2003;Smith 2007;Fetner 2008a, 2008b;Fetner 2008;Nicol and Smith 2008;Burack and Wilson 2012;Pierceson et al 2010;Tremblay et al 2011;Holzhacker 2012;Rayside and Wilcox 2012).…”

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“…Hicks, 2003;Peterson, 2011). They cohere around the idea that the only moral and natural way to create a family is within the confines of a normative heterosexual nuclear model.…”